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Landmark physics discovery may not bear fruit for decades

MARK COLVIN: The biggest scientific news of the year and maybe the decade was the confirmation this week that the team at CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland had used the Large Hadron Collider to prove the existence of the Higgs Boson.

I say prove, but with scientific caution they said they were 99.99999 per cent certain.

The Higgs boson is a subatomic particle dating from the earliest microseconds after the Big Bang, which gives everything mass.

It means scientists can now be fairly certain that they've got the science right on the bits of the universe we can see.

But there are still enormous amounts we can't; dark matter, dark energy, antimatter, for instance.

Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer is director general of CERN. He's just arrived in Melbourne for next week's International Convention of High Energy Physics, and this afternoon he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Melbourne.

Afterwards I asked him about the significance of this week's announcement.

ROLF-DIETER HEUER: I think it is very, very significant. It's I think a bit difficult for me to judge its significance because I'm always biased of course.

But I can quote Peter Knight, the president of the Institute of Physics in the UK, who compared it to the discovery of the DNA.

MARK COLVIN: It's obvious why theoretical scientists would be interested. Do you think that down the track there will be real practical implementations of it?

ROLF-DIETER HEUER: Well you have to give me a crystal ball in order to predict that. The nice thing about basic science is that it has a target, a goal, and that is knowledge gain, compared to applied science where you want to have immediately an application.

But the nice thing about the basic sciences is that at some stage you can use it directly for society but you don't know when and you don't know where.

Take the PET scan, positron emission tomography. The "P" stands for the positron, the anti-particle to the electron. And that was becoming used in hospitals around 40 years after the discovery of the positron so it's unpredictable how long it will take.

MARK COLVIN: But in the meantime scientists working on particle physics, quantum physics, just trying to understand the universe, know that the standard model actually does work.

ROLF-DIETER HEUER: The standard model does once this is really the (inaudible) of the standard model it does work. We found then, in that case, we found the last missing cornerstone of this standout model. But it only works in the energy region in which we can test it, yeah?

There must be something beyond the standout model because the standout model doesn't neither explain just for two examples; neither does it explain why we are in a matter-dominated universe, yeah? Where has all the antimatter gone and why?

MARK COLVIN: The dark energy, the dark matter.

ROLF-DIETER HEUER: And the dark energy and dark matter, yeah; the dark universe. You see it took us around five decades, 50 years, to now describe the visible universe which is 45 per cent of the matter-energy density of the universe. The rest is dark.

MARK COLVIN: So you've got this enormous machine, you've got this gigantic very, very expensive machine, what do you do with it next?

ROLF-DIETER HEUER: Well first of all you have to put it a little bit into relation, this machine is very expensive, I fully agree with you. But this is one experiment which is a world experiment.

The whole world participates in that experiment and so you have to calibrate it somehow because it's the whole world working at it and also for several, for many years. I mean you have to take this course for 20 years, 25 years so this puts it in relation.

But of course as a lump sum it's expensive, yeah.

MARK COLVIN: I wasn't really asking about the money, what I was really asking about was it's been reported almost as if it's the end of the line, but presumably you have plenty more things to do with your machine.

ROLF-DIETER HEUER: It's the beginning of the line, yeah? The discovery of something is the beginning of the next one. I mean in some sense to discover something might be even easier than the next steps because the next steps you have to find out what you really discovered.

Is it exactly this particle which you expect? Or does it hide brothers and cousins? And all this would then point to new physics beyond this standout model. So the work is just starting yeah?

MARK COLVIN: What kind of experiments are lined up next?

ROLF-DIETER HEUER: We have to find out if, as I said, what other properties of this particle and that will take us years, several years. And then we want to see, we will increase the energy of the machine from now 8 Tev (teraelectron volts) to up to 14 Tev in the year 2015 and up to 2030 we have a full program of exploring now this high energy frontier and hopefully finding, if we are lucky, candidates for example for dark matter and that will take, as I said, roughly until 2030.

So altogether we have a 20 year program with that machine.

MARK COLVIN: Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of CERN on the mind boggling world of high energy particle physics.